If we didn't already feel like we'd become part of Emily Buchanan's extended family at her Eternal Rest Bed & Breakfast after three books, there's an emphasis on the "cozy" in "cozy mystery" here in the fourth. Business is thriving. She's got bookings as far out as next February. She even has the spare cash to throw at antiques to spruce up the place. Two more assistants have come and gone, but Trish at Grainy Day Bakery is sending her son Clint over for the summer and her Aunt Mona is going to take over after that, once she's retired from teaching and moved into Oak Hill. And she's even having lunch with Trevor, who's recommending great wines.

There's a darker side, of course, but initially it's nothing to do with a murder. It's to do with Scott, Emily's late husband, because the series arc is heating up. Neither she nor Sage can reach him at the B&B or indeed anywhere in town, so they've been heading out of city limits when they can to see if that makes a difference. Today isn't the first trip but it's the first to Lake Otto and they find something seriously bad. We don't know what it is, but it's bad enough for Sage to collapse as she tries to deal with it. So, Emily sends the house ghosts out to see what they can find. They're happy to help.

Unfortunately, what happens next is that the First Coast Ghost Hunters from Jacksonville check in for their stay at Eternal Rest, because suddenly and for the first time, there are no ghosts on site. Oops! Fortunately, they take that news in good spirits, pun not intended, and promise to help with Scott, which is kind of them and a perfect angle for a paranormal cozy mystery. After all, if you're ghost hunters and the heroine needs help with a ghost, why wouldn't you do everything you could to help! Such genorosity of spirit, pun not intended again, is bread and butter for cozies like this.

For a group that spends their time looking for ghosts, they're a vibrant bunch. Catherine Simms is their leader and she's downright eager to stay in Jaxon Knight-MacGinn's room. I could almost see her bouncing up and down with excitement. She's there with her boyfriend, Blake Newman. Andy and Annie are another couple and Hal Henderson is Annie's brother, who soon captures EVPs of a ghost right there in Eternal Rest, even though the ghosts are temporarily gone. We soon discover that that's because Emily only sent the ghosts she knew about on a quest. There's a new one.

And that's because it just moved in with an antique mirror from Everything Old is New Again and the ghost hunters are right back in business. They even figure out that there was a murder, not a new one this time but a cold case. Following the trail tells Emily that the mirror originated at the Bowers mansion, which has a dark history. A quarter of a century ago, a pair of twins fought it out for their late father's inheritance and that scrap ended with the famously Judy and Jerry killing each other, apparently right in front of the very mirror that's now sitting in Jaxon's old room.

This is a great setup for a paranormal cozy mystery and it escalates just as well as it should. There isn't any apparent danger to start with, because the ghost is of someone not merely killed a long time ago but also by someone who's also dead, meaning that there isn't a murderer who might do anything to avoid being caught. However, things do indeed escalate. The power is taken out. Sage is threatened in a warning note. A theft at Eternal Rest takes all their research on the case. Even the library is robbed in a similar fashion. Clearly there's more of a story than previously suspected and someone doesn't want it to come out.

Fast forward not a heck of a distance and there are suddenly ten people staying at Eternal Rest in an attempt to keep everyone safe. Emily's there, of course, and her five current guests, who she'd asked to stay on for free to help with the investigation before it got this serious. Sage and Jen are in danger too, so they stay too, as does Reed. And Det. Hernandez makes ten, because he goes above and beyond in this one in an effort to avoid another death in town. It's quite a change from the brief moment when Emily felt lonely because all her omnipresent ghosts had left!

Everything about this book is excellent. The mystery at its heart is unexpected and engaging and kept me guessing. There's a good mix of regular characters (and locations) and fresh faces. These ghosthunters are a lot of fun and I wouldn't be averse to seeing them again in a future book. The broader series thread about what's happening with Scott's ghost is pushed forward considerably, with a powerful scene late in the book that I won't spoil, but will surely lead us into book five. And the approach that Beth Dolgner takes is different again.

I'm enjoying all these 'Eternal Rest Bed & Breakfast' books, but I'm especially enjoying how she's keeping them admirably fresh. Cozy mysteries inherently work to a formula and it must be trivial for a cozy mystery writer to create a cozy mystery template and effectively copy/paste one book into the next, changing character names and locations and whatever other details are needed to make it seem different. Dolgner emphatically doesn't do that. She adheres to all the rules of the game but shakes everything up every time to keep her readers on the hop.

For instance, the template she appeared to put in place with the first book was that the ghosts at Eternal Rest would be Emily's partners in solving crimes committed in and around the B&B. While the next couple of books featured people staying there killing or being killed, each of the murders was elsewhere, so that help was either impossible or had to change. In this book, those ghosts are absent the whole time, leaving before the mystery is discovered and not getting back until after it was solved.

In book three, Dolgner set up the potential for Emily and Sage to work as consultants to the police department, but here Det. Hernandez almost becomes their bodyguard as he keeps warning them to leave the investigation to the professionals. Of course, they don't do that because then it would cease to be an 'Eternal Rest Bed & Breakfast' story. However, that does mean that, at points, this almost leaves cozy mystery to delve into thriller territory. Almost, but not quite. Like I said, she's happy to adhere to the rules of the game.

Next up, it looks like Dolgner kills off a critic in 'Breakfast Included'. Fortunately, it isn't me. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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